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By Catherine Houstis and Spyros Lalis - May 2001
Catherine Houstis and Spyros Lalis describe the work of Project Arion. ARION, an advanced lightweight architecture for accessing scientific collections, aims to provide a new generation of Digital Library services for the searching and retrieval of digital scientific collections that reside within research and consultancy organisations.
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Scientific data and programs have long been treated as ‘private’ resources to be used only by the people/organisation who created/developed them. This ‘private ownership’ however is usually a situation arising from inaction rather than from policies restricting data reuse. Data and models are uniquely collected/developed as part of a scientific study, but post-study it is not a priori clear what should happen to the data used. There are literally thousands of scientific collections/data sets that are getting lost at the end of a study that produced them. This is tremendously valuable information, which is getting lost because of non-existent cataloguing (metadata), unreachable because of heterogeneity of software/hardware it is stored, poor documentation and etc, all at a great expense of the taxpayer’s money. Research is very expensive, as it requires specialised expertise to be carried through, thus a poor return on this investment can be prohibited if scientific collections could be shared and reused. This is the premise of a digital library, making such resources electronically available to a large number of –possibly remote– users.
Internet-based techniques have been developed to make scientific resources available to the wider scientific community and improve this situation. However, even state of the art systems typically come with four main flaws, which make them unattractive both to resource providers and users. First, the scientific data resource export procedure remains complicated involving programming effort and expertise that is alien to the data providers. Second, users are offered a simple search interface with little guidance on how to track down or create specific information. Thirdly, once a resource is found there is little support for flexible reuse, i.e. one can either take/use the resource as is or not at all. Thus, dynamic combination of several resources belonging to different providers to create new resources is virtually impossible. Last but not least, current solutions do not work with existing practices and financing methods used in the organisations that produce data and as such they are regarded as a ‘burden’ rather than as an ‘assistance’.
ARION, a recently funded international research and development project, is aiming to provide a new generation of Digital Library services for the searching and retrieval of digital scientific collections that reside within research and consultancy organisations. This functionality will be achieved via an appropriate distributed system that can be easily installed and administered by the various participants.
ARION advances the findings of previous studies in areas, such as, management of networked scientific repositories, metacomputing, intelligent information integration and digital libraries. ARION is a federated open system and is developed in association with national data providers, scientific researchers and SME’s to ensure that the project meets their needs. The ARION consortium is composed of research organisations: the Institute of Computer Science-Foundation for Research and Technology (GR) as the leader, the National Technical University of Athens (GR), the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche CNR-IMA (IT), the Commission of the European Communities, Joint Research Centre (IT), the University of Crete (GR); and the SMEs HR Wallingford Ltd (UK), the Oceanographic Company of Norway ASA and the Enterprise LSE Limited (UK). The ARION started in January 2001 and will be completed in 3 years.
The rapid development of distributed computing infrastructures and the growth of the Internet and the WWW have revolutionised the management, processing, and dissemination of scientific information. Repositories that have traditionally evolved in isolation are now connected to global networks. In addition, with common data exchange formats, standard database access interfaces, information mediation and brokering technologies in the context of Digital Libraries Initiatives and I3, Intelligent Information Integration, emerging data repositories can be accessed without knowledge of their internal syntax and storage structure. Furthermore, search engines, are enabling users to locate distributed resources by indexing appropriate metadata descriptions. Open communication architectures provide support for language-independent remote invocation of legacy code thereby paving the way towards a globally distributed library of scientific programs. Finally, workflow management systems exist for coordinating and monitoring the execution of scientific computations. The standardisation and interoperability is pursued by the W3C.
This technology has been so far successfully used to address system, syntactic, and structural interoperability of distributed heterogeneous scientific repositories [1]. However, interoperability at the semantic level is needed to overcome the problem of identifying the scientific resources that can be combined in a meaningful way to produce new data [2]. This is of key importance for providing widely diversified user groups with advanced, value-added information services.
Another body of work addresses integration of heterogeneous information over a number of networked distributed repositories [3]. In this context the aim has been in building global environmental systems. Integration has also benefited from workflow technology, which has been used originally in business processes.
A Digital Library of scientific collections is a new and unprecedented concept. It encompasses the characteristics of a traditional library and in addition, it creates new content on line. In traditional libraries humans create new knowledge after having used the library content. In the case of scientific content (and in the ARION digital library), new content is created continuously upon user demand. Any scientific area is represented not only by means of multimedia document information but also in terms of data sets, programs and tools which can produce new information, interactively, either by analyzing data or by predicting physical phenomena, in terms of simulation of physical processes. Data analysis can be statistical analysis or extraction of information from satellite pictures for instance, or data acquisition from databases belonging to the library content via data mining tools, etc.
Another difference with traditional libraries is that the content of such a library is not within the walls of a building, nor can be stored using a single centralised computer system. Scientific objects such as programs for instance, are in general not portable and in addition they may need specialised software/hardware to execute. In ARION they reside in the provider’s organisation servers and are remotely invoked via the ARION system. Thus, the content of the digital library is distributed over the provider’s servers. In addition, the library documents not only the scientific object descriptions (metadata), but also scientific expertise in terms of data production rules (workflows), to make their reuse possible to the users. Visualisation tools are used to convey information to the users, statistical tools, and any other tools scientists use with their data sets and programs all supplied by the provider’s organisation. A WWW interface makes the library services accessible from anywhere via a web browser and an Internet connection. Thus, it provides an international collaborative environment. This adds tremendous value to a worldwide community of users.
ARION has the potential of becoming an international forum of scientific content and lead the effort of creating digital libraries of scientific objects worldwide. To the best or our knowledge the generalisation of ideas presented in ARION have not been put forward previously. Previous work has addressed management of scientific information for specific scientific areas and as such in all cases is a much simpler or very specific context. In the case of ARION, the scalability of the problem, the generality of the content, and the automated thus attractive ways to add new content are dealt within the architecture.
The ARION Digital Library provides lightweight and straightforward tools to the repository providers, to automate the publication and export of their repository collections. It provides to the user an automated fast and accurate system to locate, retrieve and visualise data on demand. In scientific collections, the existence of scientific programs provide the possibility of computing data on demand by making complex combinations of data and programs existing in various heterogeneous geographically distributed and autonomous collections. The ARION advanced architecture supports these functions. Support is based on the coupling of ontologies with metadata and workflows to be able to address the needs of multiple scientific collections.
This functionality yields several technical innovations, which are indicated below:
ARION promotes advanced features of Digital Library technology and in addition it promotes features that take into account the content and characteristics of scientific collections. Specifically, it is based on an advanced middleware architecture that seamlessly integrates Digital Library, Intelligent Information Integration, and Workflow technologies. It is comprised of three main modules: the Metadata Search Engine, the Knowledge Base System, and the Workflow Runtime System, which co-operate to provide the user with the desired functionality. The architecture is shown in Fiure 1. The functionality of each component is briefly described in the following.
The Metadata Search Engine is responsible for locating external resources, either data sets or programs. It may also retrieve complementary information stored in the repositories, e.g. user documentation on the available resources. The Search Engine accepts metadata queries on the properties of resources and returns a list of metadata descriptions and references. References point to repository wrappers, which provide an access and invocation interface to the underlying legacy systems (repositories) where the data and programs reside. The Knowledge Base System accepts queries regarding the availability of ontology concepts. It generates and returns the corresponding data productions based on the available resources and the constraints imposed by the ontology rules. These productions provide all the information that is needed to construct workflow specifications. The KBS regularly communicates with the Metadata Search Engine to update its database. The Workflow Runtime System monitors and coordinates the execution of workflows. It executes each intermediate step of a workflow specification, accessing data and invoking programs through the repository wrappers. Checkpoint and recovery techniques are employed to enhance fault tolerance.
In addition, a user interface designed to work on a web browser at the user computer (with Internet access), is reached via a web address and provides access to the ARION system. A number of tools are developed for the provider in order to publish and install scientific collections into a scientific digital library in a provider friendly manner. These tools are part of the ARION architecture.
This architecture ensures the scalability and extensibility required in large, scientific collections systems. It allows operationally autonomous and geographically dispersed organisations to selectively “export” their resources. Publishing/installing a new resource with the system requires merely supplying appropriate metadata/ontology, workflow descriptions and wrappers.
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| Figure 1: A middleware architecture
for distributed scientific repositories. The system consists of interoperable Knowledge Base, Metadata Search, and Workflow Runtime components. |
To enhance performance and fault tolerance, the Metadata Search Engine can be distributed across several machines. Also, several knowledge units adhering to different domains of scientific knowledge can be plugged into the Knowledge Base System to support a wide variety of scientific applications and user groups.
Efficient execution and administration of the system are achieved via special data and program export wizards for wrapper generation, automated use of filters to transform data between different formats, and use of mobile code that is downloaded and used at the user’s request.
The ARION architecture has been presented, forming a library of data sets programs and tools, all components of scientific collections. This library is a federation of heterogeneous systems, which interoperate to provide data services to its users. These services are access of data sets when they are stored into the system archives or dynamic production of data sets when they can be produced on the fly, upon user demand. Retrieval occurs via special tools to either visualise or statistically analyze the data sets.
Due to its modularity, participants may install only parts of the system on their premises, depending on their needs and limitations, both organisational and commercial. A provider may include the entire system architecture in order to organise his in house collection or various down scale versions of it, like only search engine or metadata storage. The system architecture supports different versions with a variety of capabilities at the provider’s end, in addition to a system-wide server featuring all architectural components for everyone’s use. This important architectural feature of the ARION system addresses the scalability problem of global (Internet accessible) digital libraries of scientific collections.
This work is supported by the EU 5th framework program. IST-2000-25289
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Catherine Houstis
Institute of Computer Science-Foundation for Research and
Technology
Heraklion Greece
Catherine Houstis received her Ph.D. from the Electrical Engineering Department of Purdue University, USA, in 1977. In 1978 she was a Postdoctoral associate at the EE Dept. of Purdue University. In 1979 she joined the National Cashier Register (NCR) corporation as a research scientist in the Advanced System Research and Development department. From 1980 to 1983 Catherine worked as an assistant professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of the University of South Carolina. In 1984 she became an associate professor. From 1984-1987 she was a visiting associate professor at the EE Dept. of Purdue University.
In 1987 Catherine joined the Computer Science Department of the University of Crete. She was also a research associate at the Institute of Computer Science of FORTH. She is now a full professor and the Leader of the Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Institute of Computer Science FORTH. She has lead and participated in research projects funded by NSF in the USA, and ESPRIT, AIM, RACE, Telematics and Digital Libraries for scientific data collections in the EC. Her main research interests are in Internet based scientific information systems, Metacomputing, commercial aspects of scientific information systems and performance evaluation of global distributed systems.
Spyros Lalis
Institute of Computer Science-Foundation for Research and
Technology
Heraklion Greece
Spyros Lalis received a doctorate in Technical Sciences and a Diploma in Computer Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, in 1989 and 1994 respectively. Since 1997 he has been a Research Associate of the Institute for Computer Science at the Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Crete.
Currently Spyros is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Computer and Communications Engineering department at the University of Thessaly. He is actively involved in the design of distributed systems, two of them developed through funded European projects. He is also leading a European research project in the area of ubiquitous computing. His interests include Programming Languages and Systems, Software Engineering, Distributed and Parallel Systems, Metacomputing, Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing, and Economies of Electronic Services.
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For citation purposes:
Houstis, C and Lalis, S. "ARION: An Advanced Lightweight Architecture for accessing Scientific Collections", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/arion/>
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By Stephan Schneider - May 2001
Stephan Schneider reports on the 'Asset Management Integration of Cultural Heritage In The Interexchange of Archives' (AMICITIA) project (IST1999-20215). AMICITIA is a demonstrator project within the key action III (Multimedia content and tools), action line III.2.4: “Digital preservation of cultural heritage”. AMICITIA started on 1st of October, 2000 and will run for 2 years.
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Audiovisual archives are one of the most valuable cultural heritage resources of modern times. By providing living images, music and speech they preserve a picture of life in the past. Like other archives, such as library or art collections, they are in need of protection. Modern archiving not only serves future generations but also allows us to turn the unique wealth of European cultural heritage into value for the today's people.
The AMICITIA project [1] aims to build the base for a continued and viable digital preservation of, and access to, television and video content. It will achieve this through the construction of various vital components enabling a digital archiving system to serve all required roles in ingest, management, access and distribution of audiovisual material. Special focus has been placed on enabling remote, multilingual access to archival content stored in a distributed environment. The system is being designed to serve both the needs of professional users (regarding preservation, quality, access flexibility and usability) and the needs of public access (regarding simplicity of use, security and availability). As a demonstration project AMICITIA aims at getting its results into practical, marketable use as fast as possible.
Partners have been chosen to both develop innovative solutions and to test these solutions in real world environments. This has resulted in the consortium consisting of two groups:
i. A technology providing and researching group: Tecmath AG (DE, [2]) and Joanneum Research (AT, [3]).
ii. A strong user group including broadcasting companies and audiovisual archives such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (UK, [4]), the Austrian Broadcasting Cooperation (ORF) [5], the South-West Broadcasting Cooperation (SWR) (Germany, [6]). One new partner from the archives sector is currently being integrated in the consortium.
The work is distributed in a straightforward way: The tecmath AG acts as coordinator and provides the basic technology for a content management system. Joanneum Research, an Austrian Research Institution, develops technologies for distributed access (see the Distributed Access section).
The user partners analyse together the current workflow, finding weaknesses and developing a new idealised workflow using digital technologies. This work is led by the SWR. The user partners then define requirements for the new components to be developed in close collaboration with the technology partners. Some of the user partners have responsibility for several components: e.g. the ORF is responsible for the rights management system and for the storytelling interface (see the Access and Exchange Mechanisms section) and contributed to the multilingual (see the Distributed Access section). Extensive testing of the components integrated by the tecmath AG is also a main task of the user partners. The BBC will coordinate the evaluation process.
Most of the AMICITIA project partners were involved in the research project EUROMEDIA (ESPRIT 20636, [7]). Which ran from 1995 to 1998, this project's stated and achieved objective was to design and implement an asset management system for use in a broadcast environment to enable cooperative and efficient television production. The results of EUROMEDIA have been commercialized and are being exploited by TECMATH under the brand name media archive®. This product is currently installed at several European broadcasters and a market expansion into North America and Asia is foreseen for the future.
Two related IST projects have been started by one or more organizations involved in AMICITIA: PRIMAVERA [8] and Preservation Technology for European Broadcast Archives (PRESTO) [9]. These projects supplement each other and will work together closely to ensure that no redundant work is being done. The objectives of the these two concertating projects are:
The areas of collaboration are shown in the graph below:
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| Figure 1: Areas of collaboration |
Concertation is by no means limited to these projects only. There is for example an exchange of knowledge and experience with the Forum for Metadata Schema implementers (SCHEMA) [10] project, which concerns metadata. This collaboration is also based on personal contacts.
The AMICITIA project aims to develop and demonstrate new solutions in 4 working areas:
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| Figure 2: 4 working areas |
The challenges and their respective solutions will be described in detail below.
Distributed Access is now a problem
beyond the premises of a company or of an institution. Producing
content is very expensive and there is high pressure to reduce
cost. There are several ways to reduce production costs:
These ways require a distributed access to archives across company premises and across content owners. Many content producers, especially broadcasters, plan to reuse their content via online media. They intend to display and sell contents not only to partners within the same business but also to other professionals and to the general public.
Another challenge within Europe is multilingualism. Content Metadata is predominantly written in the native language of the content producer, which makes it difficult to retrieve for non-native users.
The AMICITIA projects responds to these challenges in two ways. The content management systems will be improved for distributed access across the Internet. For professional users there will be an interface which allows search and retrieval across the Internet, i.e. to get connected to external content management systems. This requires special protocols to ensure an overall system security on the one hand and to collaborate with the existing security mechanisms such as firewalls. To overcome the language barrier a thesaurus is under development, which aids the query in foreign language archives.
A Web interface developed separately will present selected contents to the general public.
The Distributed Access
issue described above raises new challenges to content management
systems: while copyrights can be cleared easily within one
company, distributing content requires much a higher level of
accurateness in rights issues. Professionals won’t purchase
content if the rights situation is not clear or if it is very
difficult to get the rights. Rights management is no easy matter
and it is usually done by specialised rights departments e.g. at
broadcasting companies.
Searching distributed archives requires special tools to store, select and sort the search results. Conventional search masks cannot fulfill these needs.
AMICITIA is developing an integrated property rights management system. The existing traffic lights solution (“no problem”, “restricted”, “rights unclear”) will be improved to cover the regional and factual extent of licenses and their timeframe. Existing rights management systems within the partners are analysed and will be interfaced whenever this possible.
To match the needs of searching distributed archives a so-called “story-telling” interface will be developed. The user can sort, select and pre-arrange search results with it. The new tool will support complex research work providing store and recall functionalities for long-term work and a facility to share results to empower collaborative work.
Once digitised content
was often thought to be immortal. This is a popular fallacy: Bits
of digitised content are aging rapidly. Due to its medium digital
content is exposed to degradation mainly because the physical
media e.g. disks or tapes are degrading. This is in contrast to
analogue recordings where the degradation may be visible or
audible digital recordings are degrading stealthy. Suddenly bits
flip from a “1” to “0” or vice versa or they
drop and are unreadable. If such a bit error hits vulnerable
areas of digital recordings such as file allocation tables a
whole bunch of assets may get lost. Restoration of damaged
digital media is very tedious, expensive and often impossible,
because assets, such as video frames, are coded and compressed
using complex algorithms. Most of the digital recording devices
therefore employ error correcting codes and algorithms to
overcome and correct single bit errors. Although they do work,
they work invisibly for the user of this media. The user has no
knowledge about the health of his/her media.
AMICITIA is developing a new strategy to protect digital contents. This strategy has 3 components:
The system alarms the operator before the number of defective bits exceeds the critical threshold where errors can no longer be corrected. To achieve this the system continuously monitors the bit error rate in the recording devices e.g. the tape drives in the tape libraries. Using a statistical approach the bit errors are analysed and compared with past results in order to estimate the threat of the digital content.
Once a real threat is detected the operator is warned and the threatened content is migrated to a new medium. If tapes are used the content of a damaged tape is copied to a new one. Restoring damaged media is not within the scope of the AMICITIA project but within the concertating PRESTO project.
The continuous maintenance tries to avoid bit errors through maintaining drives and media. This is done by periodicly cleaning the drives, monitoring their head adjustments and by caring the media e.g. by rewinding tape cartridges.
Most of the big
broadcasting companies have been in operation for several
decades. Their archives contain some 100.000 hours of analogue
video material. This materials is ageing and is waiting to be
digitised and annotated to protected it from further degradation.
Even in the digital age recordings are made on (digital) tapes
which have to be re-read and transferred into the digital domain
of an content management system.
It is clear that such an amount of work cannot be done manually; especially if it is done in parallel. If the digitising is done automatically the quality of the digitised content needs to be supervised continuously. No human eye can watch these endless streams of digitised video.
The project is developing a robot digitising station based on a tape library system capable of handling mixed media. The operator puts the bunch of tapes into the robot system, defines and starts the batch digitising process. The system will then do the rest while the quality of the digitised video is monitored continuously. A separate module analyses the video quality of the digitised material employing digital signal processing techniques. If the quality of the digitised material is not sufficient a fail-over process starts and this event is logged. The operator can supervise the batch process, get the loggings and can start further actions.
The AMICITIA project is now at the stage of completing the workflow analysis and requirements engineering phase. Coarse system designs have been drafted and the first graphical user interfaces have been discussed. The system architecture will now be refined to prepare the implementation of the components.
The first working prototype modules are expected for the end of this year. These modules will then be integrated into the content management system and extensively tested under real world conditions at our broadcasting partners.
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Stephan Schneider
Project Manager
Tecmath AG
Content Management Systems Division
Sauerwiesen 2
67 659 Kaiserslautern
GERMANY
stephan.schneider@cms.tecmath.com
<http://www.tecmath.de/>
Phone: +49 6301 606 200
Fax: +49 6301 606 209
Stephan Schneider is employed as Project Manager at the Research Department of Tecmath AG. He is responsible for the IST-Projects AMICITIA (IST1999-20215) and PRIMAVERA (IST1999-20408).
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For citation purposes:
Schneider, S. "AMICITIA – New Solutions for Today’s Challenges in Digital Audiovisual Archives", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/amicitia/>
By Michal Haindl and Josef Kittler - May 2001
Michal Haindl and Josef Kittler provide an overview of the joint research INCO-COPERNICUS project no. 960174 VIRTUOUS (Autonomous Acquisition of Virtual Reality Models from Real World Scenes). The article describes the project objectives, introduces the partners and summarises its main achievements.
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VIRTUOUS [1] (Autonomous Acquisition of Virtual Reality Models from Real World Scenes) was an international research project financed (1997 - 1999) by the Commission of the European Communities in frame of the INCO-COPERNICUS scheme.
Virtual reality systems can be used for a variety of applications in entertainment, medicine and manufacturing. Thus producing detailed models is of generic interest. Unfortunately the customary manual creation of virtual reality models of real world scenes is tedious and error-prone, particularly for scenes of high complexity. Any automation that can substantially reduce the laboriousness and consequently the cost of the whole process would be very beneficial. In this context visual sensors offer the ideal route to automation, especially when range and vision sensors are already common and their mutual registration can be accomplished using either standard photogrammetric techniques or an appropriate sensor setup.
The objectives of this 3-year project were to build detailed texture mapped surface models of complex real world objects, to develop efficient ways of processing colour textures and to use these models in a robot arm trainer and simulator. The core of the project was to capture virtual reality models of real world robot cell scenes automatically, without interaction with a human observer and then to validate these models in a Virtual Reality Robot Arm Trainer application. To get a lifelike simulation of the manufacturing process, it was necessary to capture 3D graphic information about all objects located in the robot workcell and make it available to the trainer in a suitable form. The aim was to automate this process as much as possible and to avoid any errors. The key approach is to combine range and visual sensor data to build object and scene models. The models are processed by a scene properties extractor and used by the trainer.
VIRTUOUS was a joint research project between the University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisboa, Portugal, Institute of Information Theory and Automation, Prague, Czech Republic, and the Institute of Control Theory and Robotics, Bratislava, Slovakia.
The University of Surrey (UoS) [2] was the coordinator of the whole project. Apart of the project management the work at UoS was primarily aimed at the building of detailed surface models of complex real world objects from range images.
The Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) [3] used computer vision techniques to acquire scene models from video sequences taken from a mobile platform. Although the objective was the same as that persued by the University of Surrey, this was a more challenging task. The advantage of scene reconstruction from video sequences is the low cost of the sensor. However, the software processing is considerably more complex.
The objectives of the Institute of Information Theory and Automation (UTIA) [4] part in the VIRTUOUS project were to segment colour and range images of a single scene, to develop algorithms for analysis of real textures found in this scene and to resynthesize these textures in an efficient way using appropriate mathematical models. Synthetic textures were finally fused with shape data and mapped to corresponding virtual objects faces.
The Institute of Control Theory and Robotics (ICTR) [5] addressed the main project application - development of a Virtual Reality Robot Arm Trainer, which also provided a mechanism to validate the scene models.
A tool for registering partial surface fragments prior to fusion into a single model was developed [UoS]. Several algorithms [6], were developed for improving quality of registered and fused 3D data based on surface refitting, surface decimation and data recalibration. Further improvements were achieved using newly developed methods for n-views registration [7] and joint centers extraction [8]. This approach significantly decreased error accumulated by the traditional pair wise registration alternative. Because single real world objects have moving parts, work has been done on the extraction of joint centers. A novel technique based solely on the marker measurements was developed [8].
A technique for building 3D models from a sequence of uncalibrated images was developed by [IST]. A correspondence analysis method [9] has been developed based on robust matching criteria. The method has a breakdown point of 50% outliers. It allows both the integration of successive images into a mosaic and 3D reconstruction, which is accomplished either using a novel Maximum likelihood estimation algorithm [10], [11] for recovering jointly the structure, camera motion and camera intrinsic parameters or an approximate method which is much faster. As the approximate reconstruction method is sensitive to missing data, an algorithm has been devised for segmenting input data into subsets in which a set of features is visible in all images. The reconstruction results obtained for the different image subsets are then fussed to obtained a single model. Another method was described in [12] which computes a dense disparity or velocity field between two images captured with different viewpoints.
Three novel range image segmentation algorithms [13], [14], [15] and two algorithms [16], [17] for colour texture segmentation were published [UTIA]. One of range image segmentation algorithms [13], [14] is based on a combination of recursive adaptive regression model prediction for detecting range image step discontinuities and of a region growing on surface lines. The algorithm [14] assumes scene objects with planar surfaces but its segmentation quality is higher on noisy range data while keeping the numerical efficiency of the simpler method [13] published in 1997. This algorithm outperforms most of the existing range image segmentation algorithms of its category.
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| Figure 1: Range image and its segmentation. | ||
Colour texture segmentation methods are based on underlying Markov random field models. One of them uses uses a novel recursive maximum pseudo-likelihood Gaussian Markov random field parameter estimation method [17]. Due to this new estimator the method is significantly faster then a similar method recently published in IEEE PAMI.
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| Figure 2: Natural texture mosaic (marble, sand, grass, stone) and its segmentation. | |
Several multiscale colour Markov random fields - based texture models [18] were derived in the project. The main advantage of these models is the possibility to synthesize texture data using fast non-iterative computations. At the same time the models are flexible enough to model a large set of natural colour textures. The models assume spectral factorization of the original colour texture data space into an orthogonal Karhunen - Loeve space, where each spectral component can be independently modelled by its dedicated 2D (mono-spectral) multi-scale MRF. Multiple resolution decomposition is based on the Laplacian pyramid technique. The resulting band-pass mono-spectral factors can be efficiently modelled with lower order MRF models.
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| Figure 3: Natural textures (upper row) and their synthetic counterparts. |
Finally the trainer [19], which consists of a PC family computer running a real-time robot control software, was connected to a workstation used as a scene viewer. Virtual reality models acquired using the above mentioned algorithms are displayed by a dynamic viewer providing a high quality real-time visualization of the robotics scene. The more advanced is the robot workcell or other environment displayed on the workstation monitor, the more realistic impression is experienced by the robot user.
The Virtuous project was concern with the development of the technology for building detailed texture mapped surface models. During the project we have developed an advanced methodology for 3D surface registration, a method for 3D object model acquisition from video sequences, several techniques for colour texture modelling and synthesis, a feedback control strategy for registering 3D surface and texture models and finally a robot trainer has been developed.
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| Figure 4: Original colour scene, range image, and its virtual model in the original and upsidedown rotated view directions. | |||
The project research resulted in more than 20 publications apart from project research reports. These achievements have been accomplished with EU project funds but also with a significant contribution of funding from complimentary sources made available at each partner home institution.
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Dr. Michal Haindl
Senior Researcher
Institute of Information Theory and Automation
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
18208 Prague
Czech Republic
haindl@utia.cas.cz
<http://www.utia.cas.cz/>
Phone: +420 2 66052350
Dr. Michal Haindl is employed
as a Senior Researcher at UTIA (Institute of Information
Theory and Automation, Prague). From 1990 to 1992, he was
visiting researcher at University of Newcastle, Newcastle;
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot; Centre for Mathematics
and Computer Science, Amsterdam and Institute National de
Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Rocquencourt working
on several image analysis and pattern recognition projects. From
1992 to 1995, he joined the Centre for Mathematics and Computer
Science,Amsterdam to work on a multimedia ESPRIT project. His
present research interest concern random fields applications in
pattern recognition and image processing. He holds Ph.D. and
Doctor of Science degrees and he is the author of about 140
papers published in books, journals and conference
proceedings.
Professor Josef Kittler
Director of the Centre for Vision, Speech, and Signal
Processing
University of Surrey
Guildford
GU2 7XH
United Kingdom
j.kittler@surrey.ac.uk
<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Research/VSSP/>
Phone: +44 1483 879294
Professor
Josef Kittler (Ph.D., ScD) is the director of the Centre
for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing of the University of
Surrey. He has been a Research Assistant in the Engineering
Department of Cambridge University (1973--75), SERC Research
Fellow at the University of Southampton (1975-77), Royal Society
European Research Fellow, Ecole Nationale Superieure des
Telecommuninations, Paris (1977--78), IBM Research Fellow,
Balliol College, Oxford (1978--80), Principal Research Associate,
SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1980--84) and Principal
Scientific Officer, SERC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (1985).
His current research interests include Pattern Recognition,
Neural Networks, Image Processing and Computer Vision. He has
co-authored a book with the title `Pattern Recognition: a
statistical approach' published by Prentice-Hall. He has
published more than 200 papers. He is a member of the Editorial
Boards of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, Pattern Recognition Journal, Image and Vision
Computing, Pattern Recognition Letters, Pattern Recognition and
Artificial Intelligence. He has served as the President of the
International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR).
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For citation purposes:
Haindl, M. and Kittler, K. "Autonomous Acquisition of Virtual Reality Models from Real World Scenes", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/virtuous/>
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By Cary Karp - May 2001
In November 2000 the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) announced the approval of its proposal to establish dot-museum as a restricted top-level domain name on the Internet. The approval was made by the board of directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the nonprofit organisation that provides oversight for domain names.
In this article Cary Karp, Director of Internet Strategy and Technology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and the President of the Museum Domain Management Association, explains why we need this new top level domain, details its evolution and gives the implications for Europe.
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The massive brick-and-mortar edifices that are normally associated with the word "museum" are an easily recognised attribute of the urban landscape. Any such institution housed in quarters that do not correspond to the stereotype can easily reassure the public about its identity with a label near the doorway containing the familiar "museum" string of letters (or, of course, any number of equivalents to it using other languages and character sets). Museums have long since established annexes in the utterly intangible world of the Internet and, although such things as Web sites have an even greater need for clear labels, there is no digital way to convey the authority of the name of a museum that is graven in stone on its grand façade. Translated into technojargon, if on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, on the Internet nobody knows you are a museum, either.
There is probably little reason to worry about the consequences of an inability to distinguish between, say, Web sites operated by pretend dogs and sites operated by real ones (bona fido canines). There may be greater need to take a less casual approach to material provided by organisations claiming to be museums. The ability to include the letter string "museum" in an Internet domain name can be purchased by anyone having about USD 10 per year to spend on it. There is no requirement, whatsoever, for the activity subsequently conducted in such a domain bearing the slightest relationship to anything that the professional museum community might regard as a legitimate museum purpose. Indeed, any one of the well over ten thousand MUSEUMSOMETHING dot-COMs, dot-ORGs and dot-NETs can as easily be used deliberately to conceal antisocial activity as it can to designate what, indeed, bears the best attributes of museumness.
The Domain Name System (DNS) was never intended to provide more than a convenient means for equating the names that people commonly use to identify the various computers that are connected to the Internet, with the numerical addresses that these computers use to identify each other. There was initially a clear semantic basis for differentiating among what have latterly come to be termed the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) dot-com, dot-org, and dot-edu (with dot-net coming later). This was expressed in rules that have never been more than loosely applied when evaluating requests for registration (with the erratic exception of dot-edu). The traditional response to the concerns expressed in the preceding paragraph would be to dismiss them with reference to their being based on an ascription of significance to domain names that they were never meant to have. A lot has happened, however, since the early days of the DNS.
The removal of all restrictions on commercial participation in the Internet resulted in a staggering inflation in the value of domain names, mostly particularly in dot-com. This gave rise to the identically named and ever so peculiar dotcom economic phenomenon. Domain names were no longer being used as loosely derived ID's for computers; they were being used to "brand" both products and corporate Web sites. Attractive domain names acquired monetary value of lunatic proportion and domain name disputes generated incessant legal action (lucrative, in turn, to specialised legal professionals). The basis for asserting that domain names were devoid of significant meaning eroded utterly despite persistent hard-line assertions to the contrary. At the same time, all pretence at enforcing the original meaning of the three-letter gTLDs was abandoned toward the unmasked end of generating as much revenue as possible from their operation.
These difficulties were seen looming on the horizon fully five years ago by the late Jon Postel, the creator of the DNS, who proposed their mitigation by the establishment of a large number of new gTLDs each intended to serve a clear purpose that could be recognised from the domain's name. This marked the start of an extraordinarily contentious and protracted discussion about the basis for what was termed Internet governance, with clear focus on modes for anchoring this on an international platform rather than leaving it the control of its initial sole guardian, the United States Government.
This process is far from over but it has passed at least two milestones. The first was the creation in 1998 of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) [1] and the second was a decision made by ICANN in November 2000 to introduce seven new gTLDs into the DNS. Although the negotiations necessary to formalise these domains are currently in progress there appears to be little doubt that an expansion of the generic top level of the DNS is imminent.
One of the new seven gTLDs is dot-museum, intended to provide the community of Internet users with a means for recognizing bona fide museums on the basis of their being registered in a gTLD specifically restricted to such use. The dot-museum charter will be on public record and anyone wishing to know the basis for entitlement to registration in the domain can easily find it.
Although this does nothing to provide the DNS with the ability to assist people who are trying to locate Net-based resources, it does allow for the recognition of the desired resources during the course of the search for them. Peering beyond the formal and narrow constraints of the DNS, having a shared name space for the global museum community can provide significant impetus and support for the development of a directory service that could permit unprecedentedly comprehensive searches for museum information in Net-based repositories. Although domain names traditionally designate computers and named services, the dot-museum nomenclature can easily be extended to provide name space for individual objects in museum collections. This would allow for a name such as monalisa.collections.louvre.museum.
One of the primary reasons for ICANN having selected dot-museum in the "first wave" of new TLDs is its suitability as the pioneer initiative in the envisioned creation of a larger number of TLDs, each dedicated to one sector of the cultural community. Taking a leap into a future where other sectors operate such domains, identically structured name spaces could be used in each of them that houses catalogable objects, such as dot-library containing magnacarta.manuscripts.british.library.
The DNS was never intended to be applied to the management of such information structures and it would be egregiously misused by any attempt at incorporating it in the implementation of what is being suggested here. That notwithstanding, the name constructs initially devised for the DNS can be extended in far-reaching regards. Museums have a fundamental mandate to describe and catalogue their holdings. The extreme utility of the various repositories of resulting information being interoperable has long been recognised, and means for implementing this has been the focus of much cost and effort. The availability of a single coherent name space into which every single museum object can be placed has potential for bringing the realisation of this goal immeasurably closer. The potential utility of extending this across the boundaries of adjacent cultural sectors should be apparent.
ICANN has entrusted the establishment and enforcement of dot-museum policy, as well as responsibility for the operation of its registry, to the Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) [2]. Although it currently consists of no more than its founding members, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) [3] and the J. Paul Getty Trust [4], MuseDoma has been incorporated as an open membership organisation providing all interested parties with the ability to participate in the on-going discussion of the refining and development of domain policy. The core elements of this policy are a statement of the basis for entitlement to registration in the domain, and the principles used for the naming of subdomains. The primary normative instrument underlying the first of these concerns is the ICOM Definition of Museum as stated in that organisation's statutes [5]. The naming principles are being devised at the time of present writing. Anyone who is interested may follow this activity as it unfolds via MuseDoma's Web site and its e-mail distribution lists [6]. Relevant developments on ICANN's side of the fence may be followed via their equivalent channels.
Although currently absorbed entirely by the legal, administrative, and technical aspects of getting the new TLD up and running, MuseDoma looks forward to being able as soon as possible to turn its attention to the development of value-added services for the dot-museum registrants. Primary among these is participating in the development of directory services that will allow us to harness the potential residing in the broad name space that is at our disposal.
The Internet architects have clearly indicated that they feel the DNS to be inadequate for many of the requirements that users have and, lacking anything better, are imposing on it. The directory services to be devised for use with dot-museum will need to be coordinated with the central initiative, in turn calling broader attention to the needs and potential of this domain (unique among the New Seven in its belonging to a sector with a centuries-long tradition of devising and managing systematic nomenclatural hierarchies).
Once it is moderately comfortably in business, MuseDoma looks forward to sharing its experience in the manifold aspects of the creation of a TLD with its siblings in the cultural community. One of the more daunting aspects of creating a TLD is the prosaic but vital need for a robust technical infrastructure. This includes the various database servers needed for the DNS, for the internal administration of the domain, and for the public availability of key bits of information about subdomain holders -- the so-called WHOIS data. These servers need absolutely reliable high-speed connections to the Internet and, to avoid "single points of failure", need to be maintained redundantly at separate and distant sites. Establishing this technical infrastructure involves enormous headache and expense. Fortunately, multiple domain registries can be operated on a shared platform with each newcomer necessitating an incremental cost that is a fraction of the initial investment.
It would be inappropriate at the moment of present writing to discuss the various means by which MuseDoma may elicit the support of operators of pre-existing such infrastructure. (The matter is subject to negotiations that are currently in progress.) What can be noted, especially given the nature of this publication, is that the options are all centered in Europe. In fact, the initial four years during which the new TLD process had been tracked toward the end of establishing a museum top-level domain - starting with the Postel Proposal and ending with the creation of MuseDoma - were all centered in Europe. The leg work and lobbying was financed primarily by the Swedish Museum of Natural History (NRM) [7] in Stockholm, in which city ICOM's central Internet host is also located.
This activity is now being formalised by the establishment of the dot-museum network information center at NRM. Every top-level domain has its so-called NIC [8], serving as the central point for the coordination of various aspects of the domain's daily operation. With due pride in the dot-museum NIC being created in the capital city of the current President State of the EU, it is being given an acronym that highlights its European basis - musEnic.
This European connection is probably not as coincidental as it first appears. Europe may well be alone in the world as an area that simultaneously houses rich repositories of cultural property, shares them across many language and cultural borders, and is an extremely sophisticated participant in the technological arena on both the consumer and industrial levels. Europe is thus ideally suited as a development and initial deployment arena for the cross-domain initiatives mentioned above. We hope that we will be able to lash musEnic firmly to European ground and that we may then see the rings on the water radiate outwardly from Europe to the rest of the world as we undertake the exhilarating task of building a cultural sector on the Internet. The cradle of the Internet's technological development was the United States of America, which demonstrated its ability to do massive good work in the process. As the Net embarks on another grand phase of its development it would be entirely fitting for Europe to be at the helm.
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Cary Karp
Director of Internet Strategy and Technology
Swedish Museum of Natural History
ck@nrm.se
<http://www.nrm.se/>
Phone: +46 8 5195 4055
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For citation purposes:
Karp, C. "The Sign on the Door: Establishing a Top-level Museum Domain on the Internet", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/museum/>
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By Emma Wagner - May 2001
One of the key issues when working with the European Commission and in Europe in general is getting to grips with Eurospeak. Eurospeak can be confusing, complicated and sometimes elitist. It could also be avoided.
Emma Wagner discusses what she calls 'the disease of Eurospeak' and details guidelines for improvement, which the European Commission's Translation Service are trying to get across to authors inside the EC.
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Eurospeak comes in all languages, believe it or not, and in all cases the symptoms and causes are the same. In this article I'll talk about the English variant, Euro-English.
Linguists love to be tolerant about the way languages grow. Just as we accept all sorts of regional accents, the argument goes, we must accept and even celebrate all variants in written language… Very politically correct, but it overlooks one simple fact: that when speaking, you can see immediately if your listener doesn’t understand, and re-phrase your statement or adjust your accent immediately; when writing, you don’t get that instant feedback. So it is perfectly possible to churn out reams of incomprehensible writing that no-one will understand – or read!
Anyone trying to communicate in writing, and who wants their message to end up in their readers' brains rather than their bins, is well advised to follow a few rules and stay anchored in the reality of a real language.
One linguist of the tolerant school, David Crystal, writes in English as a Global Language: "There is even a suggestion that some of the territories [...] in which English is learned as a foreign language may be bending English to suit their purposes. 'Euro-English' is a label sometimes given these days to the kind of English being used by French, Greek and other diplomats in the corridors of power in the new European Union, for most of who English is a foreign language" [1].
I work in those corridors of power – or in one of the offices at the European Commission, to be precise – and the prospect of Euro-English acquiring special status because it is spoken by a powerful elite fills me with dread. Surely that would spell the end of the European Union, because it would cut us off from the public, who have a right to read Commission documents in real English? In a bid to prevent the spread of Eurospeak, Euro-waffle and plain bad English in Commission documents some fellow-translators and I started the Fight the FOG [2] campaign in 1998. We wanted to encourage Commission writers and translators to write clearly, in real English (and real French, real German, real Finnish, etc.). We also instructed them to KISS - Keep It Short and Simple.
I spend much of my working time trying to eradicate Eurojargon and bad English from texts written in the European Commission. Here’s a sample: a paragraph from the minutes of an important committee meeting, 35 (!!) pages long. This came into my department last week, for translation into the 10 other official languages of the EU.
"Mr A welcomed the participants to the ZZZ meeting, in particular to the Malta delegation, that attended the meeting for the first time. He passed the floor to Mrs B who was going to intervene on behalf the French Presidency of the European Union. […]
Mr A informed about the present stage of the works on the Directive on scaffolding and works in height. He said that in October the Council had agreed a common position. In the other hand, the Parliament had presented comments to the project of Directive. A meeting between the Parliament's reporters and the Presidency of the Council had taken place for establishing a more official position in the agreement. There had been a second meeting between the Commission and the political groups of the Parliament for discussing the contents of some of the amendments. He said that the differences between the Parliament and the Council were small and that the Parliament wished scaffolds below the normal height to be included."
Why does this sort of Euro-English get written? Here are some of the causes of the disease:
Drafting by non-native speakers is unavoidable, for organisational reasons, and some of them do an excellent job. But it inevitably causes problems of interference in vocabulary and syntax. Non-native speakers can't be expected to know what sounds natural in English. Even native speakers lose this sensitivity when working outside their mother-tongue environment. When you've heard words like "eventual" and "payment delays" misused hundreds of times, you can lose touch with their real meaning.
English has taken over from French as the main language used for communication inside the EU institutions. Of course, concessions have to be made for spoken communication in an organisation where fifteen different nationalities work together. But as the above example shows, the standard of "English" is often simply too low for written communication. It is certainly more defective than the French written here by non-natives. Why? Because Brussels is a partly French-speaking city? Because the French have stricter grammar and an Académie to outlaw barbaric imports, whereas English is a very flexible language that belongs to everyone and seems to know no rules? Or maybe (unfashionable view coming up here - sorry, Professor Crystal) because English grammar has not been taught in British schools for the past 40 years, so most native English speakers can't even explain to their non-native colleagues why paragraphs like the one quoted above are not real English? Only those of us who learnt foreign languages were lucky enough to acquire any grammar.
Many authors in the EU institutions come from a tradition or a culture where concision is not a virtue. Recently the French arm of a highly respected firm of management consultants did a study for us on one aspect of the Translation Service's operation. Their report ran to 186 pages and paralysed our e-mail system. When I asked them to produce a summary, they did - 50 pages!
Specialised language, or jargon as it is less politely called, aids communication between specialists. But if it spills over into the wrong context, it is irritating and sounds ridiculous. Acronyms such as CFSP, SANCO, SLIC and PECO are all pregnant with meaning for those who understand them, but alienating for those who don't [3]. We encourage authors to spell them out when first used, or to avoid them completely. Another nasty habit of Eurocrats is to use the names of towns to mean something quite different. "Schengen" is no longer a sleepy village in Luxembourg, but an agreement on a passport-free zone; "Amsterdam" is a Treaty, and "Gymnich" is an informal meeting of foreign ministers.
In the desire to secure agreement at any cost, documents are sometimes inflated - and their logic distorted - by the inclusion of disparate material. The motives are excellent, but the result is a kind of patchwork, which is not. Foggy language helps to achieve an appearance of political consensus. But it invariably creates problems for the future, when foggy Treaties and laws have to be put into effect.
The European Commission has recently started work on several solutions:
Maybe in addition there should be a major cutback in the number and length of publications, perhaps based on reader surveys to see which ones are really useful and which could be dispensed with. In addition we could use the power of the Internet to improve the quality of written communication from the Commission. For example, texts on the Europa server could incorporate:
There is a simple cure for this disease called Eurospeak. Let people speak it, by all means, in the interests of cooperation and in-house communication with each other. But encourage them not to write it, if they want outsiders to get the message.
The Fight the FOG campaigners are trying to highlight these key principles of good writing:
Audience awareness. Remember that the defective language we use when tired and rushed is not good enough for the outside world. We must try to prevent jargon spilling over into general writing.
Honesty. Resist the tendency to be pompous, as if status and dignity could be increased by using long words and convoluted syntax.
Responsibility. Beware of "patchwork drafting". Someone must retain overall responsibility for the structure and logic of a document. This is also called accountability.
Planning ahead. Allow enough time for drafting and translation.
Expert editing. Allow experts to rewrite documents before they are translated into 10 and soon 22 languages. Experts can be outside consultants or editors - or translators can do the rewriting. Don't say "they don't know enough about our field to understand our documents". If intelligent, interested readers don't understand, that proves that the documents need to be rewritten.
KISS: Keep It Short and Simple.
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Emma Wagner
Head of Department
Translation Service
European Commission
Emma Wagner studied Modern Languages at Cambridge received her MA in Translation and Interpreting from Bath University. She has worked for the European Commission since 1972 as a translator and translation manager. She is currently head of a translation department with 250 staff translating into and out of the 11 official languages of the European Union. In 1998 she started the Fight the Fog campaign at the European Commission because "foggy language is alienating for the general public and difficult to translate well".
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For citation purposes:
Wagner, E. "Eurospeak – Fighting the Disease", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/eurospeak/>
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By Mike Robbins - May 2001
Mike Robbins gives a further introduction to Asia IT&C, a programme first mentioned in the news and events section of issue 2 of Cultivate Interactive. Asia IT&C is a five-year programme under the European Commission which co-finances projects in the Information Technology and Communications (IT&C) sectors. The projects must be joint activities between non-profit-making partners in at least two EU member states, and at least one of the participating countries/territories, which are: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. The lead partner can be either Asian or European. Co-financing of up to 80% and €400,000 is available, depending on the programme component.
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Asia
IT&C began in late 1999. Its purpose is to address not only
the ‘digital divide’ between rich and poor nations, but
also between knowledge-rich and knowledge-poor members of the
same society. It does this by co-financing co-operation between
Asia and Europe. This is the core philosophy underpinning the
programme; its intention is to strengthen links between the
IT&C sectors from both continents, rather than just handing
out grants. Like all EU activities, the programme is intended to
involve more than one EU member country, which is why there must
be partners from at least two different countries. If just one EU
country was involved, bilateral assistance from that
country’s Government would be more appropriate.
The partners must be non-profit-making, typically, they are Government departments, colleges, universities or NGOs (non-government organisations). However, this does not mean that the programme is irrelevant to the private sector, consideration is also given to projects that intend to strengthen the IT infrastructure for business. The programme is also happy to consider proposals from Chambers of Commerce and industrial or commercial associations and federations.
There are currently two Project Management Offices (PMOs); one in Belgium, and the other in Thailand. The Bangkok office is hosted by the Kingdom of Thailand through its National Electronic & Computer Technology Centre (NECTEC), a component of the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment (MOSTE).
A survey of delegates to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland in January 2000 found that 50% believed information technology would widen, not narrow, the gap between rich and poor. A recent BBC report claimed that more than 80% of the world’s people have never used a telephone [1]; however, it quoted no source for this. The UNDP Human Development Report (HDR) puts the figure at about half the population, and indeed UNDP has recently set up mechanisms to try and reduce the digital divide [2].
According to the HDR, 26.3% of the United States population use the Internet, but just 0.8% of the population in Latin America and the Caribbean use it , while only 0.5% of the population in South-East Asia use it with an even lower percentage in the Arab world, Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The divide is within, as well as between, countries, and not simply in the developing world. The BBC quotes the OECD as saying that in France, the highest income bracket had 74% PC penetration in 2000, against just 11% for the lowest income bracket [3]. However, the internal gap is more dramatic in developing countries. The number of computers in India has now reached 4.3 million [4] but this is just a fragment of the country’s one billion people, and the country is a leader in information technology. Statistics must be interpreted with care; in 1998 there were six times as many Indian-registered Hotmail accounts as there were Internet subscribers [5].
Poverty can make a terrible mockery of the information revolution. The point was made forcibly in May 1998 by the distinguished Indian scientist Dr M.S. Swaminathan, whose role in introducing dwarf wheat varieties to India in the 1960s was a key part of the Green Revolution. Speaking to scientists in the Middle East he pointed out that birthweights as low as 2.4 Kg were common in South Asia, causing what the U.N. had called “the cruellest form of inequity”- retarded intellectual development which would prevent people in the developing world from coming to grips with the new Information Age. How are such people supposed to compete in a world of the Internet and galloping information technology [6]?
But information technology can be used to benefit the poor; given sufficient imagination. A recent EC report quoted the case of “one poor village in southern India… where two solar-powered computers were installed in a room at the side of the village temple, giving access to a wealth of data. Sometimes, computers are obtained by an NGO through a donor agency; in other cases, they are bought by the village and franchised to an operator who charges a modest fee for use. Examples of results cited include finding a local veterinarian to cure a sick cow, to downloading a local map from the US Navy website, showing wave heights and wind directions in the nearby Bay of Bengal. This information was communicated to the local fishing village, which broadcast the daily weather report from loudspeakers fixed to poles along the beach" [7].
In 1996, at the first Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) meeting, in Bangkok, it was decided that strengthening links between the IT&C sectors in Asia and Europe was an important part of strengthening economic links between the two regions in general. Three years later the European Commission launched the Asia IT&C programme, giving it an initial budget of €19 million to fund about 100 projects; so far (April 2001), it has selected 16, three more will be selected at the end of 2000 and the remainder in March 2001.
Applications must be from non-profit-making concerns. This is liberally interpreted; a limited company is acceptable, for example, provided it is clearly not intended to make a profit and this is clearly stated in the statutes. State-owned corporations of which small shares are held by the private sector may also be eligible, provided there are no payments of dividends to shareholders. And although profit-making concerns are not eligible, associations of such companies – such as Chambers of Commerce, or trade or industry federations – certainly are. Asia IT&C regards them as useful partners in the development of the IT&C infrastructure for SMEs. A business cannot be funded, however; venture capital must be obtained elsewhere!
In line with the spirit of the programme, applicants must be part of a consortium of partners from at least two EU member states and one from Asia. This is a minimum. The programme wishes to encourage the broadest level of co-operation possible, building links between European and Asian countries as well as between the continents themselves, so the more partners, the better, up to a point. There is no upper limit on the number of partners, but they should all participate actively in, and benefit from, the project.
The projects must genuinely be in information technology, and/or communications development. The programme has received several proposals which were really general development projects, with IT&C ‘bolted on’ as a component. These proposals should seek funding from more suitable sources.
The programme funds co-operative projects that apply IT&C to the following areas of activity:
Applicants have to specify the Area of Activity.
They also have to specify a Programme Component. There are six of these, and they are described below – together with the percentage of co-financing, and the grant amounts, allowable. These vary between the components, so it’s important for applicants to be clear about the component under which they are seeking funding.
These join organisations together so that each knows what the other is doing. The methodology can include conferences, seminars and other ways of swapping information. A partnership will often (but not necessarily) start with this component, and can then apply for further funding under a second programme component if it has been a success. Funding available: maximum 50%, between €100,000 and €200,000.
Courses and workshops in either a business or university environment. Funding available: maximum 50%, between €100,000 and €200,000.
Proposals to improve connectivity between Europe and Asia, either globally or in a specific business or professional context. Funding available: maximum 50%, between €100,000 and €200,000.
This is intended to fund liaison, through workshops and taskforces for instance, between Asian bodies and IT&C initiatives taking place within the European Union. It is chiefly meant to help Asian partners link with, or completely participate in, European Commission initiatives such as those under the Community Research and Technological Development (RTD) framework. However, programmes or initiatives not from the European Commission are also eligible, provided they are non-profit-making, and originate from at least two EU member states.
This is intended both to help partners understand the way each other’s regulatory structures have evolved, and their strengths and weaknesses; and also for them to understand the regulatory context in which they might enter each other’s markets. This can be done through workshops, seminars, task forces and seminars.
These should consist of demonstrations of European IT&C technology, showing what it can achieve. Applicants should normally have completed a Get-In-Touch and Keep-In-Touch activity, or something similar, first. Maximum funding: 25%, between €100,000 and €200,000.
There are specific conditions attached to each Programme Component; these are described in full in the Call for Proposals 2001 and Guidelines to Applicants 2001, which can be downloaded from the Asia IT&C Web site [8].
Projects may last up to 36 months in all cases except for Short (University Level) Courses, where the maximum duration is 12 months.
Asia IT&C has already accepted proposals for a number of different types of project. The types of partners are just as diverse.
Examples include a partnership led by the University of Liège, which is co-operating with the National University of Hanoi in Vietnam, along with other partners from France, Sweden and Vietnam. This is a university-level course which will lead to a European Master in Modelisation and Design of Engineering Sciences, with the objective of strengthening Vietnam’s capacity to design flood-protection measures. It is a key question for Vietnam, where in November 1999 catastrophic flooding killed 592 people and caused $235 million worth of damage.
A very different type of project is being led by the Centre for the Development of Advanced Computing in Pune, India, in collaboration with French and Spanish partners. The objective is the development of a text-to-speech convention, Internet-compatibility and optical character recognition (OCR) software for Indian languages and scripts. This could hugely increase the applicability of information technology for non-English-speaking groups.
Different again is the development of a centre of intelligent manufacturing and rapid prototyping, which will assist in the application of IT to manufacturing industry. Led by the University of Cardiff, Wales, it involves partners from Thailand and Malaysia on the Asian side, and Germany and Greece in Europe.
As stated above, Asia IT&C cannot give grants to private companies, but it can certainly support business and industry federations in their efforts to improve the business infrastructure. Thus the programme is also co-financing a project of the Chambre de commerce et d’industrie de Paris, France, in collaboration with India, Malaysia and Ireland, which aims to integrate e-commerce in the networked world Chambers of Commerce movement.
All the projects are based around activities, not equipment or capital investment. Asia IT&C isn’t really meant to fund that. It is quite happy to include the cost of a few PCs if they are needed for the project, but this should not be a big part of the budget.
Before any steps are taken towards applying for co-financing, it’s very strongly recommended that the Call for Proposals 2001 and Guidelines to Applicants 2001 be read with great care.
Then, find your partner! Many Applicants already have a clear idea of whom they would like to work with. But those who don’t, and are seeking partners, can upload their details to Asia IT&C’s Partner Search database via the Programme’s Web site [8]. Having done so, they will appear on the database and will receive a username and password which they can use to modify their entry. Whether they register or not, they are welcome to trawl the database for suitable partners in both Asia and Europe.
The application procedure can then begin. It looks more complicated than it is. The grant application procedure is based on the European Commission’s standard format. This in turn is related to the tendering procedure, so conditions are stringent. But there is a reason for everything. Partners will, for example, be asked for the statutes of their organisation; but these are needed to prove that it is non-profit-making. Similarly, they will be asked for their latest set of accounts; these are necessary because the European Commission would not wish to transfer funds to an organisation that is heavily in debt or even bankrupt. There are numerous other documentation requirements, but all have a rationale, and if a proposal does not meet them, the programme’s management is not allowed to review it further [9]. The Commission does try to be reasonable and, in particular, fair in its procedures. Where the requirements are unclear, potential Applicants are very welcome to contact the Programme Management Offices in Brussels or Bangkok for advice.
In practice, most proposals arrive with full documentation, but they can still be rejected at this stage, simply because they are not eligible. Asia IT&C has received beautifully-prepared proposals, correct in every administrative detail, for projects that it could never have considered - either because the partner(s) were not eligible, or because there were not enough of them; or because the proposal wasn’t really an IT&C project at all.
If the proposal meets the administrative requirements, but still fails, the most common reasons are:
The Programme’s staff prefer accepting proposals to rejecting them. They are also aware that the application procedures can be complicated. Potential Applicants are extremely welcome to get in touch with the Programme Management Office (PMO) in either Brussels or Bangkok, to find out whether their project is suitable and to get informal advice and encouragement. Visitors are also welcome in person, and should contact the PMO in advance for an appointment. Bridging the digital divide is a difficult task, and Asia IT&C is always happy to meet new partners with which to share it.
Full information and documentation on the Asia IT&C programme may be found on its Web site [8].
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Mike Robbins
Asia IT&C
Mike has now left Asia IT&C. Further enquiries can be made
to Guy Franck, Director of the Programme Management Office.
guf@asia-itc.org
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For citation purposes:
Robbins, M. "Bridging the Digital Divide in Asia: a European Commission Initiative", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/asia/>
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By Roger Smith - May 2001
Roger Smith, the founder and director of this highly successful international Webzine, shares his experiences of online publications and the rationale for establishing a museum-based compendium site. Global Museum is currently read in 88 countries and maintains a weekly mailbase of more then six thousand museum professionals and those with an interest in museums [1] [2]. Global Museum remains a free Webzine available to all and has developed a style that that encourages and maintains a loyal readership. Global Museum aims for immediacy of communication rather than in-depth analysis of museological issues. As a Webzine its role is to be a one-stop shop for museum news, views, vacancies and products without being perceived to be overtly commercial, which it is not.
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Where do all the best ideas start? Usually, with an entrepreneurial thread or an observation that simply won’t go away.
In the case of Global Museum the gestation period from observation to action took several months. As the then Chairman of ICOM’s Marketing and Public relations Committee (ICOM MPR) one of the challenges I faced was to communicate with several hundred members in many countries. The traditional forms of communication often meant that notices of importance and articles of interest took far too long a period to reach those for whom they were intended. Having worked in a variety of museums over many years and at various levels of the profession, I was quick to appreciate that there was a marketing opportunity and a niche that could be catered for.
This might at first glance suggest an altogether mercenary approach. It is true that like many other bidding e-entrepreneurs, an Amazon.com bookshop affiliation provided the seed funding to get things underway, but to reach a discerning audience needs more than ecommerce activity.
Global Museum commenced as an email newsletter – an ezine. As the publisher’s Web skills developed so did the publication until it reach its current status as a fully-fledged Webzine. Adopting a business like approach for this endeavour has meant that Global Museum has never lost its primary focus. It would be my suggestion to anyone contemplating any form of publication (and especially an online initiative) that they undertake a thorough business and market planning process. Equally, I would suggest that one is not too modest in one’s ambitions in this regard but that such enthusiasm and vision needs to tempered by reality. The world is after all littered with dot.com carcasses!
Global Museum has this vision: To be the international museum compendium site on the Internet.
Our Mission: is to provide services and up-to-date cultural and scientific information to the international museum profession, and to those with an interest in museums.
We are achieving this mission by:
In regards to the latter goal, it should be noted that Global Museum is in essence a nonprofit activity and very much a ‘labour of love’ even though it is guided by business rules. As publisher, I readily understood that before going for support grant funding, it would be necessary to build site credibility backed by thorough statistical and market analysis.
Global Museum is published from Auckland, New Zealand. The time zone differences between the country of origin and the Webzine’s readership works to its advantage. The nature of the Internet and contemporary technology means that the physical address is largely immaterial to the success of such initiatives. I am also happy to reveal for the first time that, unlike its competitors, Global Museum does not have a Cecil B DeMille ‘cast of thousands’ in support. It is a solo operation supported by an understanding wife and a study full of computer equipment!
With anticipated future grant support this scenario will change modestly and one of the ideals is to create multilingual versions on a monthly basis. Global Museum’s readership demographic shows considerable interest from its North American audience with a growing readership from the European Union. It is probably opportune also to restate that the Webzine welcomes news releases from all museums and would like to think that readers of Cultivate Interactive might convey this opportunity to their local museums and governing authorities.
 |
| The Global Museum site |
As a weekly online publication Global Museum maintains sophisticated search options to keep abreast of museum news from around the world. The stories are collated mid week and subject to editorial review so that a stimulating balance of stories is presented to the readership. Wherever possible we attempt to encourage participation and feedback. Two examples of this are the introduction a humorous caption contest and the use of real-time chat technology. Regular online polls of the readership contribute to site development and we have found that the best ideas come from the users. The Webzine quite deliberately sacrifices some downloading time for a highly visual and graphic style. While such a determination doesn’t necessarily receive universal acclimation, the growing increase in the speed of Internet access largely negates any inconvenience in the medium term. This visual profile also assists in the market delineation between Global Museum and its competitors.
Global Museum sections include: International news, career and resume postings service, an international museum studies database, museum product listings, a dedicated international travel service in association with a reputable travel and accredited provider, an online bookshop and virtual mall, a museum resources database with direct file downloads and links of interest, a forum section and much more.
Job and other postings are maintained on a daily basis and the physical design and publishing takes place in-house. Complimentary to this activity is an active and ongoing promotional campaign for the Webzine using search engine placement software and directory placements. Writing for the Internet is of course a specialist activity especially when one considers that the average viewing time for a Web page is a mere 57 seconds.
The various sections of the Webzine are treated differently. Some, such as the International News and Careers sections, are more dynamic in content while others such as the Museum Studies database listing tend to be of a more annual nature.
The lesson to be learnt from publishing online is that technology should serve to support the communication not rule it. With this philosophy in mind, Global Museum is constructed using Net Object Fusion software and is based on style templates that can be easily modified. Being image-rich, the Webzine pages require careful image editing and selection. The pages are published to the server and a news alert ‘teaser’ composed. This announcement is then dispatched to the subscriber base as an email message giving headline details of the current edition.
Online user surveys confirm patronage of the various site sections and we retain a policy of always following up user suggestions as to how the site might be improved and expanded.
As a reader you might naturally expect the owner of a Webzine to be naturally biased in favour of his project’s success. It is probably appropriate to record a small selection of unsolicited reader comment and site review in support of the above. These endorsements are the sort of statements that enhance the credibility of the Web site and it would be my suggestion to all Web publishers that they consider including them in their content and promotion. Naturally all such statements must be attributed and not of a fictitious nature. Here are a couple of Global Museum examples:
“I did a survey of international museum Web sites in February of this year as part of my work for the Public Relations department at Museum Victoria, Australia, and I would have to say that the Global Museum website is easily one of the best. It is easy to navigate and is a pleasure to use due to the layout, which contributes to the usability as well as to the aesthetic of the site. The content appeals and is of relevance to both museum professionals and the general public, and the material is always current and regularly updated. I would certainly rate this site very highly; I use it on a regular basis and would not hesitate to recommend it to anyone, irrespective of their level of involvement in the museum industry.” Melinda Viksne, Public Relations, Museum Victoria, Australia
“Published by Roger Smith, Global Museum is a free weekly newsletter gathering information from a large pool of museums located all over the world. With a clean, uncluttered layout, Global Museum acts as a wonderful resource of current information. From bizarre and unbelievable news to noteworthy historical facts, this newsletter will plug you into information that is just slightly off the beaten media track. You might be surprised to read some of the articles that didn't make worldwide headlines” List-A-Day.Com review
Global Museum is an ongoing success because it has creatively used the medium of the Web as a communication device. Successful Web sites and in particular online publications need to exemplify the basics, namely that the Web is all about relationship building and engaging an audience, adopting a ‘user- driven’ philosophy and writing in a style (and selecting content) that both challenges and entertains.
Global Museum is quite deliberately not a traditional museum journal. The Webzine at aims at immediacy and providing a selection of online services of interest to its readership. The Webzine is proactive in presenting stories from around the world and has adopted a magazine format style.
The future looks bright for the Webzine. It has seen competitors come and go in the three years of its existence and has been constantly refreshing both style and content to meet the expectations of a discerning audience. Because Global Museum is not directly affiliated with any non-govermental organisation or museum organisation it has been able to retain its editorial independence, unencumbered by the demands of stakeholders or a paying membership. It is this clarity and lack of vested interest that allows it to challenge traditional views and preconceptions.
Global Museum has remained nimble its ability to identify and capitalise upon opportunity and interest, an essential element in producing a successful online publication.
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Roger Smith
Director
Global Museum International
2/70 St Johns Road
Meadowbank
Auckland
New Zealand
director@globalmuseum.org
<
http://www4.wave.co.nz/~jollyroger/president/president.htm
l>
Phone: +64 9 578 1011
Fax: +64 021 695322
Roger Smith is the former Chair of ICOM MPR and ICOM New Zealand. His career path includes museum directorships, executive directorships and consultancies, marketing and public relations. He is the founder and publisher of Global Museum and has recently moved from the physical management of museums back into education, where he is employed as Manager – Web Centre for the Auckland University of Technology. Roger has chaired and given keynote addresses at Museum conferences in Washington DC, Stavanger, Cologne and Calcutta.
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For citation purposes:
Smith, R. "Global Museum: a Personal Vision that became an Online Success", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/global/>
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By Rosa Botterill - May 2001
Rosa Botterill describes the work of the European Museums' Information Institute (EMII), a consortium of key organisations in the cultural heritage field.
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The European Museums' Information Institute [1] is a unique consortium based on a very successful partnership of key organisations. It was established to strengthen the position of the cultural heritage sector, and more specifically the work of museums in Europe. EMII is a hosted organisation, with associates in 14 member states and 2 Economic Areas of the European Union. The EMII Secretariat currently benefits from sharing resources, technical support and professional expertise from working under the auspices of mda [2], EMII's UK partner, based in Cambridge, England.
As a project, EMII
received funding for a year, from October 1999 to September 2000,
from the previous DG X - Raphaël Programme. During that
period EMII's first achievement was the delivery of the European
Standards Survey. It was generally accepted that before embarking
on new initiatives the consortium should first identify the
current status of the use of information management standards in
museums across Europe. 10 member states participated in the
original survey, which also included information on partner's
national overview and details of their future vision for EMII.
Results of the survey can be found on the EMII Web site [3].
The EMII Survey is now seen as an important business tool by the cultural heritage sector. Updated statistical information on cultural heritage promotes improved understanding of the needs of the sector, contributes to better governmental policies, and to a more focused distribution of resources. Maintaining the survey offers EMII an excellent opportunity for further development work in the future. The consortium objective is to identify means of improving on EMII's original initiative by looking for co-operation with other relevant European networks and cultural organisations, with a view to offer comprehensive research of the cultural heritage sector in future.
EMII has evolved significantly a year on from when it was first launched in 1999. The consortium expects now to be able to take a more prominent role as a vehicle for the co-ordination of cultural digitisation programmes supported by the European Commission. Its strategic objective is to increase the existing network and to convert it into a dynamic distributed centre of expertise dedicated to:
The EMII Steering Committee has recently approved a model for the future sustainability of the consortium. Funding will be derived from two primary sources:
The approval by the Information Society Directorate of EMII's latest project proposal submission demonstrates a commitment to support further work from the EMII consortium. The new project entitled EMII Distributed Content Framework, will evaluate the issues (including standards and licensing arrangements) related to the future creation of digitised content from content holders within the cultural sector and beyond, for the use, in the first instance, for research purposes in projects funded by the European Commission.
Other project initiatives are on the way. The strength of the EMII consortium is beginning to make its mark. The work of the network has evolved and has established itself as an essential element amongst initiatives supporting cultural heritage organisations in Europe. It is clear that EMII has a role to play in Europe. It is also evident that the consortium must rise to the opportunities by carrying on working in co-operation to deliver solutions to the demands of users throughout the European Union.
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Rosa Botterill
EMII Co-ordinator
c/o mda,
Jupiter House,
Station Rd,
Cambridge
CB1 2JD, UK
Phone: + 44 (0) 1223 315 760
Fax: + 44 (0) 1223 362 521
Rosa Botterill is currently Standards Co-ordinator for the EMII Consortium. Rosa has extensive professional experience in information management and the implementation of standards in a variety of contexts. Her professional career has been developed working in libraries and museums in Brazil, USA and UK. Rosa has a BA in Librarianship and Documentation from the University of Rio de Janeiro and subsequently attained diplomas in computer studies and scientific documentation. She was awarded a Technical Co-operation Award from the British Council and came to the UK where she obtained her MA in Archives, Library, Information Studies and Education from Loughborough University. She was also awarded a UNESCO/Information Programme scholarship to undertake a programme of studies in Europe on On-line retrieval of information.
Rosa's career began as a librarian in Brazil, followed by a period of research in Texas, USA before finally settling in the UK where she worked at Plymouth City Museums and Art Gallery, the National Maritime Museum, and Oxfordshire County Council. She is currently Standards Co-ordinator for the European Museums’ Information Institute, hosted by mda and based in Cambridge, UK.
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For citation purposes:
Botterill, R. "Overview of EMII - the European Museums' Information Institute", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/emii/>
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By John Paschoud - May 2001
John Paschoud from the London School of Economics Library explains how the HeadLine 'Personal Information Environment' for academic library users will evolve into part of ANGEL's 'Guided Environment for Learning'.
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The HeadLine Project [1] was funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) eLib Programme from January 1998, and concluded its' technical development phase in February 2001. An extension to the project is undertaking further user studies until July 2001.
HeadLine has produced a number of working software components (freely available on an Open Source basis to the higher education (HE) community), and also detailed studies of various aspects of the hybrid library, such as resources data-modelling [2] and user authentication and authorisation [3]. However, what has been widely perceived as 'the HeadLine model' of the hybrid library is the Personal Information Environment, or ‘PIE’. This article takes a first look (from a very first-hand point-of-view) at the ways in which this model could be broadened to encompass all the information needed by learners in higher and further education, and how the Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning (ANGEL) Project [4] will address these objectives.
The HeadLine PIE is a Web-server-based portal, first proposed in detail in November 1999 [5] providing user-centred views of collections of library resources. Each individual PIE user can configure their own library collection, so that it contains all of the resources that they want to use, and none of those that are not relevant or useful. The PIE and the thinking and machinery behind it are more fully described elsewhere [6] but for the purposes of this article the screenshot below will illustrate one example of the interface and types of resource entry-points that it presents to an end-user.
 |
| Figure 1: PIE Screenshot |
HeadLine also explored the idea of 'multi-personal' resource collections, shared by several people with common interests. The most obvious candidate groups with common interest in the same resource collections are the groups of students on the same course, but once a mechanism to enable shared access to PIE pages had been implemented, the idea could simply be extended to any group, and any individual user could quite easily create and administer a new group.
Like many fixed-budget projects, HeadLine ran out of time and money before implementing fully all the ideas it had generated. These included features like integrated, themed, online 'chat' (within group PIE pages), and user controlled current awareness alerting facilities. As far as possible, the project team has tried to preserve these ideas for the use of future developers, and has included documented specifications for them, and appropriate 'hooks' in the completed PIE program code. A potential PIE developer could implement many of these features by selecting and adapting other suitable open source components from available libraries such as Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) [7].
The HeadLine PIE is paralleled by similar developments undertaken by the HE library community worldwide [8] and also (at least in some features) by commercial products like OCLC’s WebExpress [9] MetaLib from Ex Libris [10] and Pica’s Picarta product [11]. This generic model for the presentation of personalised views of library resources has collectively come to be known as "my-library" (a term originally coined, I believe, by Eric Lease Morgan of North Carolina State University [12] ).
Soon after we had started constructing individualised views of information resources traditionally held in libraries, it didn’t take a colossal leap of our collective imagination to see the possibilities of extending these tools to encompass other personal information of use to typical users in HE, and to start visualising how "my-library" could be extended to become "my-university". In general, these other information resources fall into two main categories: administrative information (such as personal details and timetables), and pedagogic learning resources - both usually (and, unlike library resources) highly specific in both form and content to the individual university with which the individual user has the relationship of student, teacher or researcher.
As the The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [13] supersedes the eLib Programme [14] as the JISC funding vehicle for new developments in this field (for higher and further education in the UK), the focus has widened from just the library, to a more inclusive treatment of "learning resources".
For the benefit of those readers who have already been calling their library a "learning resource centre" (or something more esoteric) for some time, a good way to illustrate this distinction is to classify most 'traditional' library resources as open-ended information spaces, in which the user is not guided through any particular course of study other than the (possibly optional) sequential order imposed by the author, and learning materials as more constrained and directed information, guiding the end-user (possibly with the help of some courseware management tool, such as WebCT [15], BlackBoard [16], and many others) through one or more specific courses of study.
The trend, reflected by recent calls for research and development proposals, is for educational systems to become ever more integrated and seamless in operation. This entails sharing databases and metadata systems and allowing different users selective access to those databases, depending on their needs and their authority. For example, the latest generation of courseware development tools, Virtual Learning Environments, provide integrated systems for course development, delivery and management. Digital library developments have progressed to the point where the DNER will create a single, integrated information access and management environment for the HE community. However these developments are not yet interconnected and neither are they integrated with university management information systems.
Internet-based services of all types in all walks of life are developing versions that are customised to the individual, as net technologies mature and rich integration of content strands becomes achievable. In the context of learning and information services in HE, this trend is emerging in commercial products, but there is just as much requirement to provide customised services within the environment of the developing DNER.
“A next stage might be to create several exemplar institutional environments where information, learning and other resources are brought together in a user's normal working environment, together with rich communications and other tools" [17].
Although they are characterised by high levels of guidance, feedback and support for users, "Learning environments…imply a model with a closed resource base of learning Resources" (JISC circular 5/99). Digital library developments have put increasingly rich and powerful data sets at the disposal of the academic user but the problem students and staff face when they switch to these richer, open resources is that they leave behind the supportive learning environment designed to help them make best use of the resource.
The aim of the ANGEL Project is to create a system that brings together Digital Library technology with Learning & Teaching resources in a way that:
Most uses of digital libraries typically help the user to identify and access resources from a wide range of online databases. These resources however are “context free" - they are found according to the specific search criteria employed and do not in themselves embody any pedagogic strategy.
The ANGEL Guided Environment for Learning (or ‘GEL’) will utilise the search and retrieval capabilities of digital libraries to identify specific clusters of resources that when combined with contextualising material would form the resource base for a specific “learning episode” or activity. This learning activity would be delivered online using a virtual learning environment (VLE) such as WebCT and alternative proprietary or 'open' solutions. It will facilitate access to DNER resources for users, removing from their navigation the frequent authorisation challenges which are such a familiar and frustrating part of the current environment, and will allow any authenticated member of a participating institution to connect, using a single personal identifier and password or a digital certificate, from anywhere on the Internet, to:
Of course, recognition of these potential synergies didn't take colossal imagination from many groups who had started by working on better end-user access to management information and pedagogic resources, either. Historically (at least in UK HE) there has not been a great deal of communication between the three communities involved in university administration, teaching and learning technologies, and library services. Indeed, there is a strong possibility that within the same university, several independent groups may each be developing their own ‘one portal for everything’, leading to potential battles for global supremacy as they all attempt to engulf the traditional information territory of the others. Rather than joining these battles, we should battle against some of the academic politics that tends to enforce these divisions, and try working towards becoming ‘joined-up universities’.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the ANGEL Project is tasked with a further, and highly complementary strand of development (through one of those quirks of the JISC committee processes that is probably best left to drift into the mists of history). In addition to development of the Guided Environment for Learning, ANGEL is also producing the first working implementation to satisfy the requirements for the ‘next generation’ of user authentication and access management. The specification, currently code-named 'Sparta', is being developed by JCAS - the JISC Committee for Authentication & Security. A national scale service based on the Sparta specification will eventually supersede Athens [18] as the authentication and access-management infrastructure connecting users in HE (and further education) with information and learning resources mediated by the DNER, and from many commercial suppliers. But that's the subject for an entirely different article...
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John Paschoud
London School of Economics Library
j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk
<http://www.headline.ac.uk/public/people/people-john.html>
John Paschoud is the national project manager of the HeadLine and ANGEL projects, and is an information systems engineer working at the Library of the London School of Economics.
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For citation purposes:
Paschoud, J. "Making the PIE ...GEL", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/pie/>
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By Peter Walters - May 2001
Peter Walters introduces UK Information Society Help (UKISHELP) [1]. UKISHELP is a UK Department of Trade and Industry initiative set up to help newcomers understand and evaluate Information Society European programme's funding opportunities in the context of their business. Although UKISHELP is specifically aimed towards encouraging interest in the UK there are many lessons that can be learnt from its work for the rest of Europe.
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UKISHELP was established early in
1999 by the UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) as an
information resource for organisations bidding for IST funding.
More than 5,000 calls to the support line later, the level of
interest continues to look good for UK involvement.
To date the UK has been particularly successful in recruiting academic participants, which is important because of the vital role academic institutions fulfil in the research of developing technology. UKISHELP are now working hard to match UK academic success with commercial involvement and product development. "It’s about turning the economic mill in the country and that’s about products, services, applications, industry and commerce".
For organisations with an innovative idea who would benefit from working with other like-minded European organisations, the IST Programme is worth serious consideration. There are European funds allocated to help at every stage of product development from the very first research to user trials and marketing.
January 2001 saw the announcement of newly released funds in the Sixth Call of the IST Programme. Currently £700 million of funding is still to be awarded to participating organisations.
The European Commission has allocated some £10 billion for its current research and development programme designed to promote industrial competitiveness and improve quality of life in Europe. Prospective applicants are becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of IST Programme funding. It can support company growth and fund innovative and risky development projects. IST Programme funding should be readily considered alongside other forms of longer-term finance.
There are many benefits of using EC money for research: If you go to the bank you borrow the money; if you go to the European Commission they will give you the money. They won’t give you all the money, but they will give you the money and not charge you interest. You can apply for 100% of your manpower costs where you are just starting to appraise your market and undertake trials. If you go further down the development line you can get into a funding programme called Ten Telecom [2] which offers half the cost of your business plan and some trial marketing. You can then take your results to a bank and if you’re successful in securing a bank loan, you can even get help with the interest.
There have been many successful EU-funded projects based in the UK.
A recent project examined how IT affected the way we work. In a world of laptops, modem links and advanced telecommunications, more and more people are choosing to work remotely (away from the office), whether as employees or self-employed. This steady release of office-bound ‘battery hens’ to the freedom of the ‘teleworker’, as they are known, has brought with it a new agenda of issues. In Europe there are around 2 million teleworkers and the number is increasing, but finding work is not always easy. In response, research by the EU-funded project TeleMart has helped to establish an online brokerage service enabling organisations to quickly locate the services and teleworkers they need. The project ended in March of 1999 and TeleMart co-ordinator David Horne, of Middlesborough based Tradezone International Ltd., has licensed the software developed and businesses can now visit a virtual market place and locate suppliers of teleworked services at the Web site [3]. Telemart’s evolution will now focus on broadening the range of services available whilst improving the quality of life of teleworkers throughout the continent.
Another EU-funded project, TAPPE, based in Northern Ireland, has examined the relationship between suppliers and purchasers. The resulting software is now helping both private and public sector purchasing departments to make objective decisions about suppliers. About 60p in every £1 earned in Northern Ireland is accounted for by the public sector, so it has had a significant influence on the economy.
In November 2000 the Northern Ireland company MINEit Software Limited [4] scooped a Grand Prize (one of only three available) at the European Information Society Technologies (IST) Awards held in Nice. The Web analytics company were the first based in Northern Ireland (NI) to win the prestigious award (referred to as the Oscars of IT Europe) which carries the greatest possible recognition for information and technology companies across the continent.
The Grand Prize was awarded for MINEit’s Easyminer software product, which takes the guesswork out of e-business marketing by analysing and building predictive models of visitor behaviour at Internet sites. Their product was selected from a total of over 200 submissions from 26 countries and reached the finals, competing against 20 other companies for a prestigious Grand Prize.
It’s success stories like these that the DTI believes will inspire even more organisations to apply. And whilst there are certain procedures, acronyms and terminologies which applicants should master, UKISHELP can assist.
The procedures are there for a good reason. The Commission allocates huge amounts of money, so it’s careful not to award funds for the same project twice or projects with conflicting goals.It achieves this using administrative procedures such as invitations to apply for the money, or Calls, that happen regularly. This means that you can’t go to the Commission on any day and say, for example, ‘I’d like to work on intelligent houses!’ There are certain times during the Programme when funds for your area of interest will be allocated. Part of the UKISHELP service is to ensure that applicants know when the Calls are likely to happen, and which organisations will have most to gain from applying when they do.
The Commission fosters a greater understanding of European markets by encouraging you to work with partners from other countries. If working with a European partner is already part of your business plan this is good news. If not, you don’t have to worry about finding partners on your own. Partner search services exist in the form of SingleImage [5] and UKISHELP can put you in touch. Once you establish the right partnership, the joint venture or consortium approach presents many important benefits. You can network with partners, use them to reach new markets and exchange ideas of best practice.
Each consortium’s funding proposal is read by Independent evaluators with knowledge of the area that you are working in. They establish a concerted view of its value, and rank it alongside the others. The proposals that receive the most marks get the money. Once funding has been secured and the project is underway you should always remain clearly focussed on your project’s end results.
To maximise the benefits of involvement you should understand, even before you start, how the output is going to help you and your business, and how you are going to exploit it. This will enable you to show your partners why you’re in the business and what you want to achieve. If you understand the exploitation route you’ll increase your chances of a successful proposal and your project will flourish.
UKISHELP aims to help people put in successful bids for Projects. They have recently published a free guide for those interested. It is called 'Fast Track Guide to Successful Proposals’ and you can obtain your copy by visiting the Web site. European Funding success just involves following a number of serious do’s and don’t. Here is a few of the most important ones!
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Peter Walters
UK’s National Contact Point for the IST Programme
UKISHELP
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For citation purposes:
Walters, P. "UKISHELP: helping the UK understand the IST Programme", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/ukishelp/>
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By Phill Purdy - May 2001
The creation of digital image archives can be described as a cycle, from planning to preservation, taking in all points in between: rights management, archival image capture, data management and delivery systems. VADS as a UK Higher and Further Education data service works throughout this cycle in tandem with visual arts digital image collection creators to assist the planning, production, delivery, use and preservation of high quality digital materials.
This article by Phill Purdy illustrates how VADS works with its depositors and outlines some of the issues and methodologies employed by VADS to create its cross-searchable catalogue of archived visual arts digital image collections.
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The Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is based at The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University College. VADS is a part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) [1]. VADS and AHDS are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) [2] and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [3] to support research, learning and teaching in UK Higher and Further Education, by providing digital archiving and advisory services.
The AHDS was established in 1995 to support digital resources across the arts and humanities. The AHDS consists of five ‘Service Providers’; each with subject and technical specialisms, managed by an ‘Executive Service’ based at Kings College, London. VADS began operating in March 1997 to serve the full gamut of visual arts disciplines including fine art; design; architecture; applied arts; history and theory; media; museum studies and professional practice.
VADS provides an on-line catalogue of its archived collections and advice on the creation, management and use of visual arts digital resources. VADS aims to accession all forms of digital data, from text to multimedia and provides advice through an outreach programme that includes publications, workshops and consultation. VADS services are freely available to UK Higher and Further Education sectors and VADS seeks to work collaboratively within other sectors, both nationally and internationally. VADS accessions collections via a variety of means, from formal relationships with funding bodies, as in the case of AHRB projects, to individual negotiations with data creators.
VADS collections of third party created resources are promoted and preserved for broad and long-term academic and educational use through VADS on-line catalogue. Items within VADS catalogue are individually ‘branded’ to identity and acknowledge the original collection owners and the source of the collection. VADS catalogue represents a growing body of visual arts material, searchable across as well as within individual collections and provides a significant resource for all involved with research, learning and teaching.
Resources currently delivered by VADS include: image databases from the Imperial War Museum, London College of Fashion, National Arts Education Archive and The Design Council Archive; student degree show Web sites, and Computer Aided Learning packages.
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| Figure 1: A montage of items from VADS current and forthcoming image collections |
As of 31 March 2001, VADS catalogue provides access to five disparate image collections totaling over 6,500 digital images. These image collections are due to be shortly joined by another five collections, resulting in a total of over 15,000 images and their full catalogue records. Subsequently, VADS image collections are due to more than double in quantity over the next eighteen months through several projects VADS is currently working alongside.
VADS Catalogue of Image Collections is accessible from the Web site [4]. It offers free-text searching using Boolean and other search operators, within any or across all image database collections.
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| Figure 2: VADS Catalogue page |
Results are returned in thumbnail to 'screen-size' images with accompanying 'brief', 'core' and 'full' catalogue records. At the level of individual image records, items carry collection-stakeholder logos to identify their original source.
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| Figure 3: Example of VADS search results page |
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| Figure 4: Example of VADS core record page |
Also accessible from VADS Catalogue page are ‘Search Help’ pages, which give details of search operators and strategies; 'Collection Information', outlining the content and history of individual collections and an 'Advanced Search' facility, which allows graphical Boolean searching and choices as to how results are returned. The catalogue page also presents links to VADS non-image database collections.
As attested to above, VADS is an archive of third-party created image collections. This means that VADS does not undertake scanning and cataloguing of image collections. However, VADS does have a significant role supporting those engaged with the creation and management of visual arts digital image collections. VADS offers subject specific support to creators and managers of visual arts data, particularly those committed to or envisioning archiving with VADS.
VADS support throughout the digital creation life cycle, from planning to preservation, promotes the use of standards and good practices for data creation, ensuring maximum return on the investments made in data creation. VADS undertakes its image digitisation advisory role in collaboration with other UK Services in this field, such as the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) [5] and the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) [6].
VADS works in an advisory capacity with the majority of collections it accessions. For example, the delivering and archiving of the JISC Image Digitisation Initiative (JIDI) visual arts collections [7]. VADS was a member of the JIDI Steering Committee and has worked collaboratively with JIDI depositors throughout the process of accessioning material with VADS.
The JIDI project, started in 1996, was an important research and development project within UK Higher Education, establishing digital image capture standards and procedures [8], along with metadata creation guidelines [9]. The project benefited from major input from TASI and HEDS, providers of advice and digitisation services respectively.
There are 11 visual arts collections resulting from the JIDI project, totaling over 15,000 images in all. As of 31 March 2001, VADS is currently delivering four JIDI collections, numbering between c300 and 3,000 images each, with the remainder scheduled for delivery within the first half of 2001. Further JIDI collections to be delivered by VADS are: Design Council Slide Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University; African and Asian Visual Arts Archive; University of East London; John Johnson Collection of Political and Trades Prints; Central St Martins Museum Collection; Spellman Collection of Music Covers, University of Reading; Fawcett Library Suffragette Banners, London Guildhall University.
The four JIDI collections VADS is currently delivering are Design Council Archive, University of Brighton, London College of Fashion: College Archive and the AE Halliwell and Basic Design Collection, both from the National Arts Education Archive, Bretton Hall College, University of Leeds. These collections vary in content from fine art learning materials within the Basic Design Collection to black and white archival photographs and negatives within Design Council Archive and London College of Fashion: College Archive. Conjoining them, alongside the IWM Concise Art Collection, within robust delivery systems was the task in hand for VADS.
To enable these collections not only to be fully text searchable individually, but also across one-another, VADS had to make some important decisions about its systems. This included both image specifications and suitable data structure and systems to use, as well as managing the administrative tasks involved in creating such an archive.
The administrative tasks include managing the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) involved with image collections. VADS operates a licence agreement that establishes the rights situation and obligations of each party within the archiving relationship - the depositor (collection owner) and archive (VADS). A standard licence [10] was created as a pro forma to be used across the AHDS and allows for non-exclusive depositing of material by collection owners for VADS to deliver and preserve collections for educational purposes. This means that under the standard terms of deposit, the original rights owner maintains all rights they have in the original collection and is free to utilise the material for any other purposes. VADS is licenced solely to provide enhanced delivery and preservation of the collection for academic and educational purposes.
VADS delivery hardware is hosted at Bath University Computing Services (BUCS), a major UK Higher Education computing centre. VADS image catalogue is delivered using Index+ technology developed by Systems Simulation Ltd [11], a British software engineering company specialising in interactive text, image and multimedia information systems, with in-depth experience in the cultural heritage field.
VADS produces surrogate Web delivery images in jpeg format, derived from the archival tiffs housed off-line by VADS. The Web images are either produced in-house by VADS or obtained direct from data creators. The standard size jpeg images VADS delivers are: ‘thumbnail’ max. 90x90pixels; ‘core record’ max. 400x400pixels and ‘large’ reference image max 600x600pixels.
For its data-structure, VADS implements the Visual Resources Association Core Categories, Version 3.0 (VRA Core 3.0) [12] in its on-line delivery systems and thence promotes this standard to the wider community. VRA Core 3.0 is an image-cataloguing standard developed to describe “works of visual culture and the images that document them” [12]. For instance, using VRA Core 3.0, a painting would be documented using field titles such as: record type, measurements, material, creator, style/period, etc. In all, the published VRA Core 3.0 standard has 73 fields providing very rich and thus user-friendly descriptors of visual arts materials and their image-documents.
VRA Core 3.0 was chosen by VADS as the basis for its image collection data-structure, not only because it is one of the foremost standards for works of visual culture, but also because it promotes the use of terminology controls, which aid quality and consistency when creating data. More significantly, however, VADS adopted VRA Core 3.0 because it relates directly to other visual arts and more generic electronic resource description standards, such as the Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA) [13] and Dublin Core [14]. This inherent ‘mapping’ of VRA Core 3.0 to other standards allows for potentially increased integration of digital image records across diverse systems, a vital benefit given VADS goal of building an interoperable on-line catalogue of digital resources. VADS will initially implement interoperability of its image collections database through a gateway for all AHDS collections, using the Dublin Core and Z39.50 protocols, which will allow all AHDS collections to be cross-searched simultaneously, creating a powerful Internet access tool to access Arts and Humanities digital resources. This technology could then be extended to other national and international integrated systems to increase access and usability.
VADS systems will continue to evolve as collections expand in quantity and types, necessitating modifications to delivery and archiving systems. VADS is also undertaking a JISC funded project to investigate tools and provide resources to Promote the use of Image Collections for Learning and Teaching in the Visual Arts, (PICTIVA) [14], the results of which should be available on VADS Web site from March 2002. VADS will also continue to investigate opportunities for collaboration to increase access and use of digital collections for research, learning and teaching.
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Phill Purdy
Manager
Visual Arts Data Service
The Surrey Institute of Art & Design, University
College
Farnham
Surrey, GU9 7DS
United Kingdom
Phill@vads.ahds.ac.uk
<http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 (0)1252 892724
Fax: +44 (0)1252 892725
Phill Purdy has been working with visual resources in the academic and commercial sectors, since 1991. He has been with VADS, since November 1998, following completion of an MA in Computer Applications for the History of Art, Birkbeck College, London.
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For citation purposes:
Purdy, P. "Digital Image Archiving and Advice: in Tandem with the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS)", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/vads/>
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By Steve Glangé - May 2001
Steve Glangé reports on how you can turn your Research and Development results into successful ventures with just a little 'LIFT'. LIFT- Linking Innovation Finance and Technology [1], is a free service sponsored by the European Commission’s Innovation/SMEs Programme that can give you help and guidance through the IT financial maze.
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This article proposes to look at three different European success stories in the field of Information Technology and Life Science in order to distinguish the key factors for successful ventures.
In examining the cases of Gemplus, RheinBiotech and Lernout & Hauspie, we will show what made them successful in our opinion and how LIFT can help you to succeed.
We will end with the free services offered by the LIFT team and how you can benefit from these services.
Let's consider each of the three case studies.
What made these ventures successful? Was it the market, the product, the drive…? Or was it “entrepreneurship”?
The question is how can you find the entrepreneur in you? With competition for funding fairly high it is imperative that you assess yourself and your venture in order to detect if you are ready for external funds or to accept foreign interaction in your project. You will need to assess your self on each side, e.g. commercially, financially.
When you have decided to go forward, it is time to prepare a quality business plan, which should include the following sections:
Now that you are aware of your needs and your objectives, it is time to tell your potential investor(s) about it. Beforehand you should study your potential partners: each is interested in another aspect of your venture, e.g. a business angel, a venture capitalist.
The next step is to approach them effectively. You may approach them indirectly, e.g. through the intermediates such as consultants or a mutual acquaintance, or through more or less public events, e.g. networking events such as First Tuesday [5] or through auctions like those organised by the European investment Forum or at other seminars.
LIFT is a free service sponsored by the European Commission’s Innovation/SMEs Programme. LIFT's mission statement is to help you:
LIFT's experienced experts offer a wide range of comprehensive services including:
The LIFT toolkit includes a document on Assessing your venture that lets you answer some of the questions any venture capitalist may ask and shows you how well prepared you are. Preparing a Technology Business Plan shows you how to prepare a successful business plan and finally Financing Innovation – A Guide gives you an overview of all the sources of finance and how they operate [6].
LIFT runs a number of workshops throughout Europe with hands-on instruction and guidance.
The LIFT Helpdesk provides individualised support, help and direction - via phone, fax, email or post - on a wide range of high technology business financing issues. The service is free of charge, fully confidential and currently available in English, French and German.
What's next? Now it is up to you to:
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Steve Glangé
LIFT (Linking Innovation Finance and Technology)
11 rue de Bitbourg
L-1279 Hamm
Luxembourg
steve.glange@lift.lu
URL: <http://www.lift.lu/>
Phone: +352 428 001
Fax: +352 428 00344
Steve Glangé is employed as a Senior Consultant at INBIS Luxembourg Ltd (a Management Consultancy branch of INBIS Ltd UK). His responsibilities include assisting entrepreneurs on their way to commercialization and implementing Technology Transfer.
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For citation purposes:
Glangé, S. "Introduction to Innovation Finance", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/lift/>
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ISSN 1471-3225 |